Legacies and Laments
by ncfan
Summary: Byakuya lays eyes on Rukia for the first time.


**Characters:** Byakuya, Rukia, Hisana, with a cameo of Renji.**  
Pairing: **Byakuya x Hisana**  
Timeline**: Pre-manga; just before Byakuya adopts Rukia.  
**Warning/Spoilers**: Spoilers for Soul Society Arc, chapter 179.**  
Disclaimer:** I don't own Bleach.

* * *

Byakuya knew he had a legacy, even if he himself was childless.

She was small and thin, dressed in the white and red uniform issued to female students of the Academy.

Byakuya stared at her, distracted, as she fled down the hall with a friend whose incredibly tall frame dwarfed her in comparison.

_A pair of wide, violet eyes stared at him from the darkness of the grimy alley, always watching, never blinking, never losing focus for a moment._

His ears twitched as a soft voice floated towards him from down the hall. "Do you want to go to that restaurant they talked about after the evening lecture, Renji?"

"Sure."

The girl had a stronger sense of liveliness than Hisana had possessed. She looked nearly identical, but she was very different inside, a light to darkness or darkness to light.

"_Byakuya-sama, do you ever…want children?" Hisana asked hesitantly, her huge eyes shying away from Byakuya's scrutinizing gaze as he looked at her in curiosity._

"_Children?" Byakuya inquired, for once being caught entirely off guard. Then again, Hisana, with her hidden depths and unexpected questions, had a way of catching him off guard._

Rukia. That was the girl's name. Byakuya knew without ever asking that that was the young woman's name as she ran with a fluid grace, fitting of one who was to be a Shinigami.

She was Rukia of Inuzuri. Hisana's sister. Byakuya's own sister-in-law.

"_Yes, Byakuya-sama." Despite having lived with him for two years, Hisana had never quite overcome the denizen-aristocrat mentality she held towards Byakuya. Her eyes were, as ever, downcast and brushed the ground with a modest, slightly shaken gaze._

_Byakuya found himself frowning pensively. "I don't know that I have ever thought of having children before," he answered honestly, folding his arms about his chest._

_That could only mean one thing. Hisana wanted children. Personally, the prospect disturbed Byakuya greatly; he couldn't imagine small children running through the Kuchiki estate, and he couldn't imagine himself a father._

_Children were a legacy. They were not the only one, but they were the first and foremost that most thought about. But not Byakuya._

Rukia was a living shadow of Hisana, practically her sister clad in still-living flesh, while Hisana's body moldered in the cold hard ground. She breathed her sister's breath, used her sister's hand, stared at the world out of her sister's deep violet eyes.

Byakuya found his eyes following her as they always had Hisana, as the tiny girl disappeared from sight at a bend in the hall, accompanied by her tall, red-haired friend.

"_Byakuya-sama." It was three years later, and maybe because of shyness, maybe because of a guilt that she had never been able to shake, Hisana still didn't meet Byakuya's eyes. "Please find my sister."_

_Byakuya reached for her hand, running his fingers across the skin soothingly._

"_Then, after you find her, please do not tell her that I am her sister."_

_Byakuya's eyes widened in surprise, but he said nothing. Hisana's voice was so hoarse and weak as to be near-inaudible; he would not interrupt her and risk not hearing correctly something she said._

"_Without telling her anything, please, Byakuya-sama, please protect my sister no matter what." Hisana no longer seemed capable of shedding tears as she had in all the other times in which she spoke of her sister. "I abandoned her," she whispered, voice shaking and gripped with the guilt that had come to define her very being, "so I don't deserve to be her sister. So I hope that she can be Byakuya-sama's sister."_

_Byakuya had never been very impulsive, but at that moment, he decided he could be forgiven for it. "Of course," he murmured, "of course."_

Catching the eye of the teacher whose room Rukia had emerged from some minutes ago, Byakuya took him aside and began to make inquiries he knew were unnecessary into the background of the girl who had gone running down the hall with her friend.

Byakuya had found his legacy.


End file.
